Feature film · Directed by Philippa Lowthorpe · From the memoir by Helen Macdonald
When H is for Hawk reached the screen, the bird at the centre of it had to be real. Not a puppet, not a composite, not slowed down to hide the difficulty — a living goshawk, flying at full speed, in real time, alongside an actor who had never held a bird of prey in her life.
Lloyd and Rose Buck trained, prepared and handled every goshawk in the film. Five birds shared the role of Mabel, each cast for a different stage of the story: the action flyer, the two young sisters who carried the early training scenes, the calm bird who made the quiet domestic moments possible, and a small male for a handful of shots.
It took six years from the director’s first phone call to the first day of principal photography, and fifteen months of daily preparation before a camera turned. Lloyd is direct about where it sits in nearly four decades of bird film work: it is the hardest thing he and Rose have ever done.
There’s no more difficult bird to work with for filming than a goshawk, period. They have zero tolerance of anything they don’t like.Lloyd Buck
The Birds Who Played Mabel
No single goshawk could carry the part. Each bird was chosen for the thing it did best — and, just as important, for what it would tolerate.
Lottie
The action bird
Rose’s imprint and a veteran of wildlife filming. Lottie flew every hunting and chase sequence. She has grown up with drones, gimbals and long lenses since she was a chick — and with a bright yellow lure she has known as prey since her first feed.
Mabel 1
Mid-training, the bath & Cambridge
Parent-reared, confident on the surface and deeply sensitive underneath. She carried the later training scenes, the bathing scene and the street sequence in Cambridge. Lloyd kept her after filming; she now flies purely for pleasure and will not work again.
Mabel 2
The early manning scenes
Mabel 1’s sister from the same clutch and, in Lloyd’s words, chalk and cheese to her. Flap first, think later — and, crucially, she let it go straight afterwards. That is why she plays the first unhooding. She has since been rehomed to a single dedicated keeper.
Jess
The interior scenes
A ten-year-old female borrowed for three months from Stuart at Loch Lomond Bird of Prey Centre — about as un-goshawk-like as a goshawk gets. She played the paper-ball game with Claire Foy. That play was not staged; it genuinely happened on camera.
Juha
Supporting shots
Lloyd’s small male appears only briefly. Male goshawks are around a third smaller than females, and the size difference reads on screen, so his footage was used sparingly.
Two weeks to make it work
Claire Foy came to the Bucks’ home a fortnight before principal photography. She had never handled a bird of prey. Six years of planning rested on whether five goshawks would accept a stranger — and with goshawks there is no negotiating that.
She started on Lily, a barn owl, then fed one of the Mabels on the glove so bird and actor could meet properly. Then Lottie went on the fist: full imprint, flying fit, and entirely uninterested in being polite about it. Intimidating, and Claire said so.
That evening Lloyd sent the director a phone video with a short message: this is going to work.
One rule held for the whole shoot. Claire never fed Lottie. To Lottie she was a perch, never a source of food — so Lottie never once got spiky or demanding with her.
The Rules on Set
The birds’ welfare came first — a position set by the director and the producers before Lloyd asked for it. Everything else was built around that.
Dark clothing, no exceptions
The entire crew of one hundred wore dark or drab colours. A bright jacket in a goshawk’s eyeline is a lost take, and possibly a lost day.
Empty the room
Anyone not essential to a take waited outside. The director spent a good deal of the shoot hidden behind furniture. Sound was recorded remotely rather than on a boom.
The bird sets the schedule
Scenes were ordered around what each bird could give that day, with food weighed to the gram between takes. When a bird had had enough, that was the end of it.
Real time, not slow motion
Wildlife sequences are almost always slowed down. The director wanted this one gritty and real, which meant pulling focus on a goshawk closing at 40 to 45 mph.
Nothing was caught
Lottie never took a rabbit or a pheasant. She was chasing a bright yellow artificial lure roughly the size of a bag of sugar. The quarry was added in VFX.
Do not cut that camera
For the bathing scene the house was cleared, the camera run remotely and everyone sent upstairs in silence. Five minutes passed with nothing. Lloyd held the set. Then Mabel 1 stepped into the water.
Three Moments
Meticulous preparation, and then the part nobody can plan.
The paper game
In the book, Mabel becomes settled enough to play — throwing a ball of paper back and forth with Helen. Nobody was sure it could be filmed. It needed the right mood and a great deal of trust. When the camera rolled, Jess simply started playing: tossing the paper, peering through a cardboard tube. Lloyd’s verdict: you couldn’t have scripted that.
Cambridge
Lloyd and Rose had walked the two Mabels up and down their village lane almost daily for fifteen months, feeding them on the glove, showing them traffic and people. Cambridge was a different order of magnitude. He expected to call cut the moment the hood came off and swap in Jess. Instead Mabel 1 looked around and got on with it. He still doesn’t fully know why it worked.
The bath
Fifteen minutes were available. The room was emptied, the camera set to run remotely, and Lloyd left too — nobody wants an audience in the bath. Five minutes of nothing, and a whisper in his earpiece suggesting they move on. He refused. Mabel 1 dropped down into the water and washed. At home she bathes every single day and loves it — but a film set is not home, and that is the whole difficulty in one shot.
It’s like all the best things in life. Preparation and chance.Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk
Shooting a goshawk at full speed
The flying sequences went to the Bucks’ go-to specialist camera team. Chris Watts and Alex Johnstone shot all the action work on the rope gimbal rig and the drone, alongside Mark Payne-Gill — a collaborator of the Bucks for thirty-five years — on the long lens. The three have worked together as a specialist camera collaboration across many productions.
Pulling focus on a goshawk coming through trees towards camera at 45 mph, in real time, for the big screen, is about as hard as the job gets. The rope gimbal rig tracked alongside the bird through dense woodland on a 50–1000mm lens; the drone flew beside her across open ground. Off camera, Lloyd hid behind trees with the lure in hand while Rose released; over a filming day Lottie would come to the lure forty or so times without a trace of resentment, because that is what she has done since she was small.
The action flying, Lloyd says, was the easy part. It’s what they do. The hard part was the interiors — five or six angles for one small scene, in a room, with a bird in someone else’s hands.
Gallery
Behind the scenes and on set.
Not only the goshawks
Two other members of the Buck family appear in the film. Onyx is a rescued rook, too imprinted on people to be released, who came to Lloyd and Rose when no other home could be found. And the wood mouse in the flashback scene with Brendan Gleeson is Onion — the only mammal on the place — who arrived three years ago for an unrelated sequence and stayed, because she was far too tame to survive the first cat she met.
They are part of a family of nearly forty birds, some long retired: starlings approaching nineteen, a pigeon called Blue who is nearly twenty.
The bird who got him through it
The day the director rang to confirm the film was finally happening was the day Lloyd came home from the heart institute with a diagnosis: a genetic valve problem requiring seven hours of open-heart surgery.
Through the four months between diagnosis and operation he could no longer walk down to the birds, so he went on a borrowed mobility scooter — every single day, however he felt — because the connection with Mabel 1 had to be kept alive for the film to work. He was told recovery usually takes three to six months. He had ten or eleven weeks before Claire Foy’s training began, and he made it.
Mabel 1 stayed. She flies now for no reason other than her own enjoyment.
She was such a focus through that really horrible time. I feel a huge connection to her. She’s just a really special bird — I just let her enjoy flying.Lloyd Buck
Production Credits
- Film
- H is for Hawk
- Based on
- H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
- Director
- Philippa Lowthorpe
- Starring
- Claire Foy, Brendan Gleeson
- Bird training & handling
- Lloyd Buck and Rose Buck
- Long-lens cinematography
- Mark Payne-Gill
- Rope gimbal & drone
- Chris Watts and Alex Johnstone
- Birds supplied
- Lottie, Mabel 1, Mabel 2 and a male goshawk (Lloyd & Rose Buck); Jess (Loch Lomond Bird of Prey Centre); Onyx, rook; Onion, wood mouse
Lloyd talks through the whole production in a 47-minute interview with SMJ Falconry — watch it on YouTube.
Working with us
Lloyd and Rose Buck work with their own family of birds on documentary, film, drama, commercial and photography projects.